A widening gap? A gender-based analysis of performance on the colombian high school exit examination

Abstract

In this article, we provide evidence that girls underperform boys with similar characteristics on the Colombian high school exit examination. Using the quantile regression technique, we find a significant gender gap favoring boys, which widens along the distribution. The Juhn-Murphy-Pierce decomposition shows that personal, family, and school characteristics explain a small part of the gap whereas differences in returns play an important role. In addition, we show that the observed gap differs significantly by administrative regions, suggesting that specific characteristics of each region could be influencing girls’ performance.